Coby Dowdell. "The American Hermit and the British Castaway:
Voluntary Retreat and Deliberative Democracy in Early American Culture"
inEarly American Literature,
vol. 46, no. 1 (2011), p. 121-156.

The British castaway of the article title is Daniel Defoe's Robinson
Crusoe, a model for fictional adaptations in colonial and revolutionary
American culture -- but also a self-portrait of the nascent United
States. The 1780s and 1790s -- the focus of the article --
rediscovered the archtype of the hermit but presented it in a new and
culturally-specific way. Author Dowdell examines the ways in which both
the figure and practices of the American hermit are taken up as
"culturally resonant analogies for early American political
subjectivity." The sudden popularity of the hermit in poems, almanacs,
waxwork exhibits, and choral music of the 1790s and the "widespread
hermit's tale, a previously unrecognized American literary genre" is a
surprising historical fact. As Dowdell explains:

The hermit's political significance
derives from his or her capacity to confront the aporetic conditions of
a past Revolutionary Amiercan national identity situated precariously
at the boundary between solitude and society, public and private,
Federalist and anti-Federalist, and Britishness and Americanness.

Why was the hermit figure so popular in the American consciousness
of this time? Why did the traveling wax museums of the day feature
"An Old Hermit" among stock figures like George Washington, the Mad
Woman, the Indian Chief, and others? Where Washington represented
"dispassionate moderation and balanced deliberation," the Old Hermit
represented "Stoic restraint," while other figures like farmers and
domestic couples represented modest values of republican virtue.

Hence
the hermit figure was not historic, not religious, and not eremetical
but a sturdy-minded patriot eschewing the tumult of society and
politics to represent in the post-revolutionary era "a disinterested
patriotism enabled by a vigilant moderation of the passions." An era
when political passions ran high and society sought a stable transition
to natiohood was disposed to symbolic and reassuring icons.

The virtues of moderation that link
Washington with the Old Hermit forcefully enunciate the internal logic
of ... deliberative democracy as a solution to the strife of the
political partisanship that emerged during the consitutional period.

The age worried about social contract, about social stratification,
partisanship, power, and influence, so a symbol of "voluntary
retirement" addresses these spheres of public versus private.
Popularizers of the hermit image sought a figure transcending politics
or, rather, eschewing the public arena for personal reflection, to
"defer taking sides." Because the hermit can endure disagreement, he
becomes the ideal citizen, emulating Washington's famous cautionary
prudence.

In the next section of the article, Dowdell discusses the hermit's
tale. The formulaic genre usually presents travelers or adventurers who
discover a (usually male) hermit

in a cave (or hut) nestled in some
secluded Edenic valley, far from
the intruding eyes of the public world. Attention to the length of his
or her seclusion and notice of the age of the hermit (often of biblical
proportions) are among the first items of conversation. The hermit is
invariably hospitable, inviting the travelers into his or her humble
dwelling and treating them to a simple (often vegetarian) meal.

The meal finished, the travelers solicit the hermit's history
and motive, which is told. The travelers then announce their departure
and invite the hermit to join them. Not unexpectedly, the hermit
declines but produces manuscripts for the travelers "with a request
that they be organized and published for the greater benefit of
society."

Thus the hermit's tale safeguards the political motive of reclusion
while presenting a public declaration otherwise overweaning and obvious
from the tale's author. As Dowdell puts it, "The textual artifact of
the hermit's willful reclusion sustains the hermitic citizen's liminal
status by grounding the hermit's otherworldliness in the materiality of
the manuscript." The hermit retains a public status and the intent to
participate in the commonweal, however indirectly.

This "textual self-consciousness" of the hermit's tale originates in
Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, as the author shows, and in the imitative
Buckland's Wonderful Discovery
and subsequent versions, including
Longveville, Winkfield, Brake, and Amos Wilson, among others. In each
(beginning with Defoe), the castaway transforms reluctance and
resentment into a "protracted exercise in self-fashioning ..." and a
triumph of ingenious individualism.

But the hermit's manuscript
suggests more to these many tales than mere adventure. An increased
interest in what the hermit has to say begins to overshadow the
castaway elements of the tale.

The hermit's retreat is ... a rhetorical
retreat figured
topographically by the hermit's physical withdrawal from society, a
gesture that is hopeful enough about the redemption of the world to
offer his or her wisdom, yet hopeless enough to reject the possibility
of taking sides and returning to the stifling limitations of a partisan
society.

The process of concentrating on the hermit's wisdom in a manuscript
culminates in Thoreau's Walden
(1854), where the physical devices and
contrivances fall away to leave the transition to "studied
deliberation." In the case of Amos Wilson, for example, its author
prescribes a "heremitic Protestant theology"
that "encourages the practices of studied deliberation central to
antebellum American republican democracy." Solitude thus provides a
weaning stage for public reflection and moderation in what Dowdell
considers a "firmly established Anglican approach to practical
divinity." Wilson intends a balance between extremes of piety.
Unable to reconcile the contradictions of contemporary American
society, Amos Wilson (and the American hermit) choose not to decide.

In
short:

The American hermit 's confrontation of
the particularizing threats
of private affection and the universalizing threats of rational
discourse is unique in its refusal to embrace either extreme. In that
refusal, the American hermit is placed at the threshold more than on a
pedestal ...

Knowing United States history, a reader can surmise where this
refusal of extremes is going, given antebellum times. Dowdell notes
that Tocqueville had already described policy-making and social change
in the United States as "slow and quiet." Amos Wilson had given
approbation to this attitude, and John O'Sullivan identified it in the
Democratic Party's presidents: Van Buren, Polk, and Pierce. O'Sullivan
commends retirement from "the din of daily warfare" and tells his
readers to maintain "silent observation of man." Notwithstanding the
violent legacy of Andrew Jackson, the Democrats' call for sobriety and
impartiality was aimed at the issue most agitating the country:
slavery, and how the issue was to be resolved nationally. O'Sullivan's
theme of solitude and withdrawal effectively intends to neutralize
agitation and militancy among abolitionists.

Dowdell does not take his article in this direction of study,
however. The
hermit figure of social withdrawal is, rather, he states, an
inheritance of deliberative democracy originating in post-revolutionary
times, checking the impulse to necessary consensus and agreement based
on partisanship. Dowdell concludes, however, that "what we make of this
particular paradox undoubtedly requires further deliberation." And,
indeed, the American hermit myth, if one may call it so, disappears
after the magnitude of the slavery issue looms larger into the
succeeding decades of the mid-19th century.

Representative works cited by the author.

Peter Longueville. The English Hermit.
1727.
Thomas Hopkinson. Liberty, a Poem
... Said to Be Written by a Hermit ...
1769.
James Buckland. A Wonderful
Discovery of a Hermit. 1786.A Faithful Narrative of Elizabeth
Wilson. 1786.
Samuel Brake. An Account of the
Wonderful Hermit's Death and Burial.
1787.
Abraham Panther. A Surprising
Account of the Discovery of a Lady ...
1787.The Hermit's Soliloquy. 1788.
Anne-Therese de Marguenet de Courcelles, Marquise de Lambert. The Fair
Solitary, or Female Hermit. 1790.
Lavinia. The Hermitess, or Fair
Secluder. 1790.
Charles Dibdin. Hannah Hewit, or,
the Female Crusoe. 1792.John Atkinson. The Hermit, or an
Account of Francis Adam Joseph
Phyle. 1811.
Amos Wilson. The Pennsylvania Hermit: A Narrative
[bound with] The Sweets of Solitude.
... 1838 (attributed 1821 or 1822).
John O'Sullivan. Democracy.
1840.